We Have the Power to Overcome the Challenges Humankind Faces

I write often about the daunting number of challenges that humankind faces vis-à-vis sustainability, and note that many of them are rooted in our approach to energy: climate change/desertification, ocean acidification, loss of bio-diversity, water and food shortages, skyrocketing rates of lung disease, terrorism associated with oil, etc. It’s hard to remain optimistic in face of all this, but I actually do believe that we’ll somehow find a soft landing here.

Why?

One reason is that, as we’ve seen historically, the presence of a few individuals is all that is required to make an enormous difference in the outcome of events here on Earth.  Today’s not a bad time to bring this up, as it’s the birthday of two people who did exactly that, i.e., changed the way of life of many millions of people, and left broad and extremely positive social change in their wake.

Harriet Beecher Stowe would have turned 203 today.  Best known for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she brought the brutal realities of slavery to millions of Northerners, who, up until that time, had been fairly well insulated from its horrors.  Each one deeply moved and many totally outraged, readers quickly mounted a vocal opposition to slavery, and the practice, many thousands of years old, was finally outlawed in the United States just a few years later.

It’s also the birthday of Che Guevara, born in 1928, Latin American revolutionary who stood behind the common man in the face of terrible oppression and became an important and powerful mid-20th Century symbol for the power of the people.

Just a reminder of the capacity that exists in each one of us: we can change the world.